Updated October 2026
Open source databases let you run your data layer without a license fee or vendor lock-in: you can read the code, self-host it, and move providers when you need to. Most of the cloud database services you pay for are built on open source engines.
This list covers database engines, analytics and key-value stores, ORMs, and the clients and admin tools you use to work with them. Every project is licensed, actively maintained, and ranked by GitHub stars.
Ranked by GitHub stars and refreshed daily.
by supabase
The Postgres development platform. Supabase gives you a dedicated Postgres database to build your web, mobile, and AI applications.
by django
The Web framework for perfectionists with deadlines.
by netdata
The fastest path to AI-powered full stack observability, even for lean teams.
by etcd-io
Distributed reliable key-value store for the most critical data of a distributed system
by dbeaver
Free universal database tool and SQL client
by ClickHouse
ClickHouse® is a real-time analytics database management system
by prisma
The Prisma ORM: write your application in TypeScript with human-readable queries instead of SQL. Host your database on Prisma Postgres and your app on Prisma Compute.
by LeCoupa
👩💻👨💻 Awesome cheatsheets for popular programming languages, frameworks and development tools. They include everything you should know in one single file.
by duckdb
DuckDB is a high-performance analytical database system
by pingcap
TiDB is built for agentic workloads that grow unpredictably, with ACID guarantees and native support for transactions, analytics, and vector search. No data silos. No noisy neighbors. No infrastruc…
by drawdb-io
Free, simple, and intuitive online database diagram editor and SQL generator.
by go-gorm
The fantastic ORM library for Golang, aims to be developer friendly
by The-Vibe-Company
An open-source engine that turns continuous content streams into search and monitoring. Durable ingestion, hybrid search, alerts, and plugins for formats, models and business rules.
by typeorm
TypeScript & JavaScript ORM for Node.js — supports PostgreSQL, MySQL, MariaDB, SQLite, SQL Server, Oracle, and more.
by SheetJS
📗 SheetJS Spreadsheet Data Toolkit -- New home https://git.sheetjs.com/SheetJS/sheetjs
by drizzle-team
ORM
by facebook
A library that provides an embeddable, persistent key-value store for fast storage.
by influxdata
Scalable datastore for metrics, events, and real-time analytics
by sequelize
Feature-rich ORM for modern Node.js and TypeScript, it supports PostgreSQL (with JSON and JSONB support), MySQL, MariaDB, SQLite, MS SQL Server, Snowflake, Oracle DB, DB2 and DB2 for IBM i.
by chinabugotech
🍬A set of tools that keep Java sweet.
by chroma-core
Search infrastructure for AI
by PostgREST
REST API for any Postgres database
by valkey-io
A flexible distributed key-value database that is optimized for caching and other realtime workloads.
by Automattic
MongoDB object modeling designed to work in an asynchronous environment.
By GitHub stars, the most popular projects on this list right now are Supabase, django, and Netdata. The ranking is rebuilt every day from GitHub.
For most applications a relational database such as PostgreSQL, MySQL, or SQLite is the safe default. Pick a specialized engine when the workload calls for it: a columnar store for analytics, a key-value store for caching, or a document database for flexible schemas.
Usually, but check the license. Permissive licenses such as MIT, Apache 2.0, and PostgreSQL allow commercial use freely, while some projects use source-available licenses that restrict offering the database as a hosted service.
